My name is Elisabeth, I'm from the land of ice (Michigan) I'm home schooled and I'm eighteen. I like to sing and write and read and worship God. I like to be direct and blunt.
I feel kind of guilty about having only one post, but hey, everyone has to start sometime!
I didn't start really writing until June of 2011, and I've been exclusively using pencil and paper until about a month ago when I discovered that nobody gets up until ten O'clock around here. I am not a morning person, but this is the only time I can get privacy while using the downstairs-only computer. So I make it work.
A little bit about my history: I've been a bookworm since before I could read. I became aware of my desire for adventure after I read Gertrude Warner's The Blue Bay mystery. Thus followed a period of intense longing for the kind of adventures the Alden children had. In my drawing book over a picture of a person in a ship, I wrote this poem, with the original spelling. It's not dated, so I can only guess that I was nine or ten.
I wish, I wish, with all my might, to have an advenchure, in God's sight.
I hope to go on a flight or a cruse, but please don't make me get a bruse.
It's pretty silly, but it was the beginning of the writing bug, and let me tell you why.
After a while I pretty much figured out that the Alden's type of adventures are pretty rare, and they either happen by accident or when you have tons of money like they did... or they can happen in your brain. So I read every adventure book I could get my hands on, and started going on adventures in my imagination. For the past five years I don't think there's been more than a handful of nights that I haven't done this, though I've moved on from the Robinson Crusoe dramas of my tween and pre-tween years. My adventures are now more grown-up, and incorporate different characters from myself, but, truth be told, they are still adventures and I am still very much a part of them.
I wrote my first story when I was either six or seven, a short story entitled the Adventures of Cat and Dog. I tried to write a few different Robinson Crusoe-type books, but never finished them, maybe because they were just that- Robinson Crusoe's, and not mine. In 2009 or so, I came up with a more grown up story, a biblical time romance. Long story short, it died. My current project is a story from the American Civil War, and it's going much better, though I can't tell you specifically how much is done because much of it is still in the giant notebook that I was writing in up until a month ago.
Now, for the story of how my writing style was developed. From the fourth grade to the tenth, my English curricula was very rigorous. I hated it. I hated all the rules and the hard work. I felt like I wasn't good at it, though I generally got a B average. So my writing was kind of in limbo for that period, though, as I said, I wrote a few Robinson Crusoe-type stuff that I never finished. In my junior year, I moved on to an SAT preparation course because my English only went up to the tenth grade. I had already written a few scenes of my current book in the year before. They were really bad, and I had quit, I think, but I'm not sure. Anyway this SAT prep book stated that the single best preparation for the SAT was reading good books, and it gave us the freedom to choose the books we wanted from a list of classics. Being the bookworm that I was, I loved that!
Thus I began what I believe was the single best thing I ever did for my writing style. I loved most of the books (once I got used to the hard words) and my tastes began to change. The books I had enjoyed before I began my journey now seemed shallow. They didn't sound good anymore. I looked over my old manuscripts, and saw them for what they were: they were terrible. A friend of mine says, "When you read crap, you'll write crap." I've found this to be very true in my own experience. When I began writing again, my style was much better, and I found myself enjoying it. Finally I had the freedom to break the rules! I now find it irritating when people feel like they always have to follow the rules. No matter if there's a dangling participle or two, if it sounds good, it's right!
So there you have it. Me, and my writing, in a nutshell. I plan to write on here once every two weeks.
No comments:
Post a Comment